[slumpt_]

The entire point is that experts are doing this triage for you, and building upon fruitful lanes of research.

To think that as an outsider to a field you are qualified to discover 'gems' (and between the lines here is a bit of an assumption that one is more qualified than researchers in the field, who are of course trying to discover 'gems') seems misguided.

[mindcrime]

I'm not an "outsider to the field" though. I'm just not affiliated with an academic institution and I don't make my living as an academic researcher.

But I am educated in my chosen field and I read the same books and journals and attend the same conferences, as the people you're referring to. The biggest difference is only in incentives and imposed constraints. I have a lot more freedom since I'm not operating within the "publish or perish" paradigm.

[SideQuark]

Pretty much all tenured researchers are beyond the publish or perish stage, and I’d conjecture they also publish most of the highly cited works, since writing good papers helped them get tenured. There’s millions of such people worldwide.

Assuming there’s some “incentives and imposed constraints” anywhere uniform to academics that you’re magically free from that lets you turn low cited papers into gems at a higher rate than all of academia combined is the most self delusional, simplistic, aggrandizing belief I’ve heard in a long time.